XSS is the most prevalent web application security flaw. XSS flaws occur when an application includes user supplied data in a page sent to the browser without properly validating or escaping that content. There are three known types of XSS flaws: 1) Stored, 2) Reflected, and 3) DOM based XSS.

Consider the business value of the affected system and all the data it processes.

Also consider the business impact of public exposure of the vulnerability.

Am I Vulnerable To 'Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)'?

You are vulnerable if you do not ensure that all user supplied input is properly escaped, or you do not verify it to be safe via input validation, before including that input in the output page. Without proper output escaping or validation, such input will be treated as active content in the browser. If Ajax is being used to dynamically update the page, are you using safe JavaScript APIs? For unsafe JavaScript APIs, encoding or validation must also be used.

Automated tools can find some XSS problems automatically. However, each application builds output pages differently and uses different browser side interpreters such as JavaScript, ActiveX, Flash, and Silverlight, making automated detection difficult. Therefore, complete coverage requires a combination of manual code review and penetration testing, in addition to automated approaches.

Web 2.0 technologies, such as Ajax, make XSS much more difficult to detect via automated tools.

The preferred option is to properly escape all untrusted data based on the HTML context (body, attribute, JavaScript, CSS, or URL) that the data will be placed into. See the OWASP XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet for details on the required data escaping techniques.

Positive or “whitelist” input validation is also recommended as it helps protect against XSS, but is not a complete defense as many applications require special characters in their input. Such validation should, as much as possible, validate the length, characters, format, and business rules on that data before accepting the input.

This causes the victim’s session ID to be sent to the attacker’s website, allowing the attacker to hijack the user’s current session.
Note that attackers can also use XSS to defeat any automated CSRF defense the application might employ. See A8 for info on CSRF.
Detection of most XSS flaws is fairly easy via testing or code analysis.